WikiWords:Sign your posts on talk pages
It is proper Etiquette to sign your posts on Talk pages. This is an essential aspect of communication here. It helps other users understand the progress and evolution of a dialog. Because of this necessity, MediaWiki developers created a very easy way to create signatures. To automatically sign your posts with a date-stamp, add four tildes (~~~~) at the end of your message; or add three tildes (~~~) to add just your name. (In general, using the full date-stamp is preferred.) Here's a list of all the signature options: If you chose to contribute to WikiWords without logging in, the tildes will be converted to your IP address to be displayed as your signature. (An account actually provides you with more anonymity, if you are concerned about IP privacy issues.) You can also consider manually signing your posts with a pseudonym or tag such as ''--anon'' (although your IP address will still be stored in the page history if you edit without logging in). If your preferred signature consists of non-ASCII characters (Chinese for example), you are encouraged to use ASCII characters in them as well. This is because not everyone can view certain characters, and instead may find a box or other replacement where the non-ASCII character would properly be. Customizing your signature Registered users can customize their signature by going to and changing the field "Nickname". The software automatically places "" and "" around the text entered in this field, so that whatever nickname you choose to use as a signature will be linked to your user page. Although not a policy, it seems to be common practice (and common courtesy) to use a signature name that is either identical or closely related to your account name, or to use your real name. To answer a frequently asked question, you may include a link to your talk page in your signature by using the same "Your nickname" field under . You should enter this string, substituting your own UserName and nickname: :nickname]] [[User_talk:UserName|(talk) Once the automatic beginning and ending text is wrapped around this string, the full text nickname (talk) is used to replace the tildes in a signature, and thus provides a link to both user and talk pages. There are as many variations of the talk link as there are Wikipedians; if you see a signature on a given page that you like, you can click "edit this page" to see how that editor created the effect. If you have a complicated signature that doesn't work correctly with the automatic wrapping of beginning and ending text, you can now (as of the MediaWiki 1.5 upgrade) choose the "Raw signatures (without automatic link)" checkbox in your Preferences. Just fill the "Your nickname" field with your desired signature, exactly as you want it to be substituted for the tildes. Please note that the inclusion of images in your signature is somewhat discouraged -- it is distracting to many users, puts a small but unnecessary drain on the servers, and can badly distort the normal display of talk pages (especially if the image link should become broken, or the viewer has images turned off in their browsers). Note that the talk link is somewhat "disguised" in some signatures -- it might look like a last name, or even the last letter of a name, or a single symbol. Hovering the mouse pointer over the link should tell you (in a tooltip, browser status bar, or other) whether the link is pointing to "User", "User talk", or something else. Things to avoid Appearance It is possible to be playful with the signature, for example by including ornamental Unicode characters (☻♂♖♥★, etc.) and using HTML tags to change the color and/or size. Images in the signature are discouraged for several reasons: *they use additional server resources *they can reduce searchability and make it more difficult to copy text from a page *they are potentially distracting from the actual message *in most browsers, images do not scale with the text, making lines with images higher than those without. Your signature should not blink, as this annoys many other editors. Length Please try to keep signatures short, because very long signatures cloud up the page source in edit mode, making it harder for other editors to find where your comment stopped. Both images and long signatures carry the danger of giving undue prominence to that user's contribution. Reduce it to the minimum necessary. Transclusion/template Avoid using page transclusion or templates for signatures (like those which appear as , for example). The reason given is that this is an avoidable drain on the server resources. Transcluded signatures require extra processing and, whenever you do change your signature source, all talk pages you've posted on must be re-cached. One can imagine the impact if these kinds of signatures were in common use. Signature templates are also vandalism targets, and will be forever, even if the user leaves the project. Simple text signatures, which are stored along with the page content, use no more resources than the comments themselves and avoid these problems. If you really must use a userpage as a source of boilerplace for your signature, at least substitute it so it is only transcluded once, for example , More about Talk pages See WikiWords:Talk page for accepted conventions and guidelines regarding the use of talk pages.